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Wrapping up, but the work is just beginning…

The team pauses for a photo at the ice edge. The ice piles in the background had been stacking up along the coast since last night due to the force of the wind pushing it on shore.

Our final day at Oliktok Point was a fairly quiet one. As the forecast predicted, the winds kicked up to around 20 mph this morning, and didn’t get any better from there. Doug and I made an attempt to get a plane up this morning, but a combination of wind, visibility, and aircraft issues prevented us from flying. Therefore, we spent the rest of the morning getting stuff ready for the trip back, packing our stuff back at the camp, and doing some initial data analysis on the flights completed so far.

The flight tracks from all of the DataHawk flights from this campaign. A lot of profiles and loiter circles!

The last time we had a DataHawk campaign up here, I did a “by the numbers” summary at the end. I figured I’d do a quick comparison between this time around and the last. Below, I summarize this trip (last summer’s numbers are in parentheses):

Number of days spent on site at Oliktok: 11 (13.5)

Total number of flights: 41 (163)

Total number of flight hours: 17.3 (23.2)

Highest altitude flown: 450 m (850 m)

Lowest altitude flown (not during take off/landing): 10 m (1 m)

Number of aircraft lost: 0 (0)

Number of times the ground station was started: 58 (348)

Number of weather balloons launched by ERASMUS team members: 1 (2)

Number of bears seen: 0** (2) ** But we did see some polar bear prints!

Number of radars we would really have preferred not to have had to deal with: 2 (2)

A couple of things really stand out to me. First, we started the ground station about 1/6 as many times, which is the result of two main things: 1) Dale Lawrence and his team have made incredible progress in advancing the DataHawk system to be able to handle the interference resulting from the USAF radar up here. This means that we had longer flights and less troubleshooting. 2) We only had five good flight days, as compared to nearly 12 last time around, limiting our opportunities to fly. But, despite this second fact, we only had slightly fewer flight hours — again, a testament to the greatly improved performance of the aircraft in this environment! Our average flight time this time around was a little over 25 minutes, with several flights over 40 minutes. Last time, we only averaged around 9 minutes, due to the major interference issues we faced. A great improvement!

Together with the tethered balloon data and that collected by the AMF, I think we got a pretty nice dataset to analyze and study further. While the campaign is wrapping up, the hard work is just beginning. This includes making all of these measurements easily accessible — all of these measurements, along with many others, are stored at the DOE ARM program”s data archive so that anyone can use them. After that, we use these measurements to actually advance our understanding on clouds and atmospheric processes. This can take quite some time, but without the measurements none of it is possible. I’ll leave it with some final photos of Oliktok — it’s been a long but relatively successful trip!

DataHawk 75 returns to the coastline and gets a good shot of Doug monitoring its flight from the beach (I was there with a truck, just outside of this shot!).

Doug, Al and Gijs (and DataHawk 77) bundle up to combat the cold wind this morning.

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Unmanned Aircraft on Alaska’s North Slope, part 3

CIRES scientist Gijs de Boer, who works in NOAA’s Physical Sciences Division, will work with a team of University of Colorado Boulder scientists and engineers at Oliktok Point, Alaska from 10-22 October to deploy the DataHawk unmanned aircraft system (UAS). This UAS was developed and instrumented in collaboration with the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV) in CU-Boulder's Aerospace Engineering department, and is being deployed in collaboration with the Integrated Remote and In-Situ Sensing (IRISS) CU "Grand Challenge" effort. The purpose of these flights is to obtain measurements of thermodynamic properties of the lower atmosphere, including information on the exchange of energy between the Earth’s surface and the overlying air during the initial formation of sea ice over the Arctic Ocean. Data collected during these flights will aid in understanding Arctic climate and processes critical to sea ice formation. In addition to the DataHawk activities, CIRES/PSD scientist Matthew Shupe and NCAR scientist Carl Schmitt will deploy instruments on a tethered balloon system operated by the US Department of Energy’s ARM program. And—the team will deploy a turbulence probe developed at the University of Leeds, an ice crystal imager developed at NCAR, and an aerosol spectrometer developed in the NOAA Chemical Sciences Division. These sensors will provide information on the structure of the atmosphere, clouds and precipitation, and the aerosol particles that go into cloud formation. Follow our work, funded by the US Department of Energy and supported by CIRES, NOAA, CU and NCAR, on this blog!